625.5.

"It's all too beautiful..." running through my head. What song is that? I'm thinking the Faces' "Itchykoo Park," but doesn't sound right.

Rain, as expected, but not too bad. I really need to get a rear fender - every time I go through a puddle, butt-debris. All clothing drying in the locker, prolly still be damp for the ride home. It doesn't much matter if it's actually raining (barring downpours) or just wet on the ground - I still get about the same amount of wet.

Like a postal worker, I must make my appointed round-trip. It would be nice to be better armed, though.

Oddly, the light of cold (& wet) reason this morning sort of illuminates the vehicle debacle. There's no getting around the fact that it just needs to be done, and it's not really like it's gonna break me. Good things will happen sometime later. If I'm going to take a certain delight in voluntary hardships, might as well lay back and enjoy the involuntary ones!

One thing nice, it hasn't led to heavy drinking, and it seems I've finally made the same night-before/morning-after connection with drinking that I made some ten years ago with cocaine.

It's not like I ever thought of drinking/drugs as a "solution" or an "escape" re problems. It was just a fully-conditioned reaction to them. Bummed? Drink! Like hitting my knee with a hammer. As it happened, I had pretty much the same reflex for happiness, boredom, payday, and just about any other emotion or situation. I can't believe that I ever took hangovers as a matter of course, though. The drinking (or drugging) itself was pleasant enough for the first hour or two, but it not only tended to turn sour before the evening was up, it would leave a sour taste in my mouth for at least a day following, and leave my brain fuzzy for as much as a week.

Now there's no excuse for my fuzzy brain, but at least I'm not actively adding to the fuzziness. After all, "Fur is Murder."

I think I'm finally seeing some weight loss, some slight reduction in flab. Though biking is my only exercise right now, so I don't really expect to get washboard abs or anything, I do expect, from the non-drinking and 40 miles a week of biking, a certain slimming effect. It's nice to see that happening, even if it is only imaginary.

It's easier to have a good self-image when there's less "self" to get your mind around.

Back to the quill and papyrus, then...

621.8.

Does anyone even read these stupid things?

Head gasket. $1500 - $2000, or more once they get it open. I guess I expected this, but I'm bummed nonetheless. This on top of recent housing rejection and continuing uncertainty, wimpy tax refunds (note: after 10% deduction into 401k AND $100 extra tax every paycheck), general life changes, and seemingly a million upcoming expenses, and wanting to have a worthy honeymoon, a dreamy camping vacation through all of our favorite desert lands and some new ones. It all costs money; money that I'm watching pour out of my bank accoutn before my eyes, a flow I can't staunch.

Bike shop *just happens* to be closed for the weekend - was hoping to take it in for maintenance, perhaps preventing disability of my only current mode of transpo.

When it rains it pours. Expect now for the real bad weather to start, jah? Or an injury that removes the biking option altogether.

At the ripe old age of 43, I'm just now starting to fully understand that saying, "That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger" (or something like that). I've always relished hardships (when they weren't TOO hard), when I've undergone them voluntarily. As long as the car sat in the driveway, an unknown, it was my own glib choice to do the bike-exclusive commute. And I was saving money - enough to be ready to pounce on a new home, if something good turned up. Enough to buy a new car and not sweat it too much. Enough to weather a month or two of unemployment. Enough, at least, to do one of those things.

Now that the car is in the shop and I know it's a BIG expense, and it's no longer a happy little "voluntary" thing, the bike ride is just a way of getting to work, isn't it.

And I just don't understand what I could have done differently, really, to have avoided this. The temp gauge was never pegged in the red, it was just (apparently) running very warm. They "fixed" an overheating problem in September 99 - so why did this come up again so badly?

Pedal on, dude. It must be done, and it will make me stronger, and this is just a setback, albeit a large one. And hey, I was ahead there for a month or two - I actually HAVE the money to fix the car; this has almost never been the case with prevous car trouble.

But I'm mighty tired of the feeling of dark, dark despair, not getting what we want and getting what we don't want.

It certainly helps to have Terrie with me through stuff like this. I honestly cannot imagine life without her.

617.9.

Well, dropped off the car. I have a bad feeling that this is gonna kill the savings, but it must be done. Poor ol' Mustang, I don't know how much of its current troubles are the fault of Ford, and how much are the fault of Blake's Auto Body (who attached a clip from another Mustang when this one was "totalled"). One thing that's a little annoying, I had it in to Dave's about 6 months ago for an overheating problem, and now it was overheating again, and finally (perhaps) blew a head gasket. Aren't they supposed to fix things more or less permanently, when they fix things? Not in today's customer-service-oriented world. The customer can suck lemons.

This morning was of the type I've been meaning to photograph, frost on the ground and a mellow sunrise. But though I had the camera, didn't have the heart for it.

From Dave's, I took the Lohrman-Magnolia-Marshall-Skillman route. Not very pleasant once you cross Petaluma Blvd, but other than that, not bad. No big uphills, a couple of "nice" (but not in low 30s/high 20s!) downhills.

Liking my job -- I'm finally busy -- but starting to actively hate the company. They keep having these mandatory meetings, and the meetings almost always turn out to be pointless, at least to me, the lowly drone. Latest is a mandatory quarterly meeting, 8am to 8pm, in Burlingame (twelve-hour day plus an hour and a half commute each way), with a bloody DRESS code - no jeans, t-shirts, tennis shoes. This kind of stuff is WHY I'M NOT A SALES PERSON.

No other place I've worked has created such hardships for its (development- and engineering-type) employees. No other place I've *heard of* has done so.

Meanwhile, there are several deadlines looming.

Granted, the annual meeting is a "treat," and I'm sure "they" feel we owe them bigtime for that.

I would only object a little IF there was a solid reason for me to be there in person - and maybe there is - but if past experience serves, I could as well be in Katmandu and get exactly the same value from it.

Oh well. They pay me, I do what they say. To the showers....

610.4.

Late start. Chilly but still. Wind last night was pretty annoying - I'd like to say I dislike it more than rain, but in the midst of it, rain is worse. Worst of all, I guess, would be windy rain in the dark .

Vulture atop a telephone pole, head uplifted (but wings not spread), looking towards the sun. I've gained a lot more respect for vultures in the past few years. They're actually pretty majestic creatures (and the largest birds we typically see hereabouts).

Car goes into the shop tomorrow. Think I can keep riding most days even with the car available. The tough ones are when I'm late, when it's cold, and when it's rainy. Rain is the only one that really should stop me...

602.8.

Breeze picking up as promised in weather reports, probably about 40 degrees, just before sunrise. No frost. Geese and vultures out in force this a.m. Pair of black and white goats on Fair Ave. Oddly, no barking dogs today.

I hate when someone's walking in the same direction as me on the overpass. They don't hear me coming though I whistle a merry tune loudly as I approach. Can't really go off the curb around them because the road traffic is coming towards me (and the curb's pretty high, so I'm committed to facing them past the onramp on the other side). If she'd suck it up and plaster herself against the fence, I could go past safely and continue on my way. But NOOO, she's taking every inch of the sidewalk with her massive bulk, trundling along there at .31415 mph... And of course if I get OFF the bike to walk it past her, I'm a double-wide too.

Passed the fearsome 600... Not too bad... passed 500 on 1/18 - 20 days ago (so THAT's why I'm blogging this!). Avg 5 miles per day (haven't ridden weekends much since it's been my commute -- it's closer to 8 mpd if I only count the days I actually ride), not a big deal, but satisfying to have the numbers rolling consistently rather than in spurts of 15, 20, 25. Considering it took a couple of months to get to the initial 100, and from there to 200, etc. If I'm spending ANY time defending/justifying my mileage, it's really too much time, isn't it.

599.1.

Remind me -- it's February, right? Once again, I rode home in a t-shirt, carrying two sweatshirts in the pack - figure it's close to 70 degrees out right now. Made the King hill in 6th gear -- usually, I wimp out about halfway up and get down to about 2nd for that last part.

I always try to take the long way when I start getting close to a mileage milestone (e.g. 600, tomorrow); whe I left work I was thinking I might do the full-on Pepper Road -> Spring Hill run, but then I just sorta automatically turned off Pepper onto King... It's a no-turning-back difference of like eight miles, so no small decision... Maybe tomorrow.

592.6.

Very foggy, enough so that the glasses were pretty much glazed over by the time I got to the downhill on Bailey, and I had to stop before heading into the 1/4-mile high-alert zone (going east on westbound Petaluma Blvd.), where the oncoming headlights would completely blind me...

"Chased" a pheasant for about 50 feet along a front yard on Skillman. Graceful as those guys look in flight, they're only slightly less clumsy than a quail, on foot.

Pleasant enough ride. Wonder how long I'll be able to keep doing this (i.e., if we're going to have to move to someplace thirty miles from work and the bike will sit rusting in the garage/backyard).

Lots of unknowns at this point -- that's just one of 'em.